Alice's Story
by YlvaThorgalsdottir
Summary: Alice wakes up in the forest, not knowing where or when she is. All she has to go by is a vision of a kind man with fair hair. Rated M.


_All publicly recognizable characters are the property of their respective owners. No copyright infringement is intended. I merely wanted to know more about Alice: her abilities and how she sees life.  
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**Alice**

As the blazing subsided and my vision cleared, I found myself lying on my back, surrounded by trees. I was lying on grass, the sky above was blue. Then, barely thinking it, I was sitting up straight in the middle of a clearing in the forest. Birds chirping, leaves rustling, the smells of earth and grass and wormwood and so many other things. Everything was calm. My throat felt dry, which seemed wrong, yet all I could feel was wonder. What was that feeling? What was this place?

I saw something other than the forest around me. It was like dream images flitting before my eyes. While I was immobilized by electric sensations they had been blurred and incomprehensible, flickering images of things to come, but now they were clear and vivid. Many of them showed me the face of a man, very pale and with blond hair. He was devastatingly handsome, his lips curved into a slight smile that reached his eyes thousandfold. The joy in those eyes… it made me feel warmer inside me. The eyes were red – no, yellow. The vision couldn't decide, it seemed, flickering between the two; it was confusing, but I accepted it, not knowing of anything else to do. He had curved silvery lines on his face. I knew that he was mine, and I looked around, expecting him to appear in the clearing.

It was more confusing than anything that he didn't show up right away. Everything else I did, I did by thinking it; how come meeting this man was any different? I studied the thought-image, looking for clues. While I sat distracted my vision and the dry ache in my throat, a branch snapped behind me. I turned without thinking, seeing a wide-eyed, muzzled creature on four legs whirling to run away. My throat flamed, and in a flash I saw the paths I could take and chose one instinctively, unthinkingly, launching myself after the doe. I caught her by my arms around her neck and sank my teeth into her flesh.

When I was done and the creature was lying still on the ground, I heard a low sound, like weeping. Looking up, I saw a small version of the creature I had just drained, and I just knew that it felt sad. It was afraid of me, but it wouldn't quite give up on the bigger one, although that one laid dead at my feet. I didn't wait to be asked twice.

Afterwards, I sat on the ground for a long time, thinking about what I had done. I had sucked the life out of not one, but two living beings. I felt neither bad nor good about it, just paralyzed. It took a while for all of it to sink in, and while I sat there, the light dimmed and the forest grew dark around me.

* * *

><p>The following days I roamed the woods, feeding on anything that was unfortunate enough to cross my path. I was hungry. I struggled to distinguish the visions in my head from the things my senses told me.<p>

It only occurred to me to do so after I realized that the fair-haired man I kept seeing in my head was absent in the forest. Later, I would also realize that I could look _back_ on things as well as ahead, though I didn't grasp the full meaning of that yet. The thing about events I could look back on was that I could learn from them – like what happened the first time I fed – and use it later, whereas the things I was looking ahead at I could only know about, I couldn't use them to improve my hunting or refine what I did, and somehow they didn't give me any 'food for thought' either, as I didn't reflect on them. They were just there, and I just knew they were going to happen.

When it came to the creatures I used to quench my thirst, I found it appalling that they could be alive and then – not. Despite that, I never felt bad enough about it to starve myself: my instincts would not have permitted it. I discovered that, during the day, my skin would glow white, and when the sun emerged from behind a cloud, it would throw off bright colors on the tree trunks around me. I concluded that this was not the best way to sneak up on prey, and so I would hunt at night and spend the days resting or walking, sometimes deep in thought, but more often far deeper in wonder at the world I had discovered.

It would take some time before I understood that there had been a world there before I woke up in the clearing, and that _I_ had existed before that, too.

* * *

><p>One day, I caught a scent that was absolutely amazing. I followed it, and found myself at the edge of the forest, where two creatures were sitting on the grass, chattering loudly. Unlike most creatures, they appeared oblivious to my presence even after I had stared at them for a bit. After a few moments of listening, their chattering began to make sense to me, though I had no idea why. They uttered sounds with shapes like "weather", "nice" and "boy", and my mind – not my foresight, but something deeper in me, which drew on the things that <em>had<em> happened – provided images explaining what those sounds meant. At one point, I realized I knew what the word for these creatures was, too: "girls". The wind was blowing their scent away from me, so I could stand to watch and wait for a few minutes. The visions in my head told me one thing: if the wind turned, if I got their overwhelmingly delicious scent thrown at me like that and I drained one of them the way I had drained animals, I would regret it deeply. Not because the other one would run screaming – I saw that she wouldn't have a chance to – and a lot of other creatures like these would come after me with nothing but violence in their minds – which they would, whether I let her get away or not. I would regret it because – and this thought really startled me – I would have destroyed something that was like myself. I would have drained myself of life, or begun to, and I would always after that be a hollow shell. The vision of my own bright red, furious animal eyes and my blood-dripping lips made me shudder, but the most terrifying thing of all: the man's eyes turned sad, then doubtful, and then his eyes became empty, too, like an animal that is desperate for food. This would occur because of me; for a moment, I saw no other way, and it filled me with despair.

Another flash of vision interrupted my grief: I saw those girls' backs begin to turn a moment before they actually began to turn to look at me. Warned a fraction of a second ahead of time, I fled before they could see anything but the rustling leaves where I had stood.


End file.
